Chiesina Uzzanese

The name says exactly how it went: everything began with a chiesina, a little church. In 1514 the nobleman Lucantonio Poschi asked the comune of Pescia for a piece of land near the Ponte Uzzanese — the bridge over the Pescia stream, recorded since 1298 and still there, though a provincial road now runs over it — to build a small church dedicated to Santa Maria della Neve. In 1575 that church was raised to a parish, and to give it a territory pieces were detached from the communities of Uzzano, Montecarlo and Pescia. The first house of Chiesina is of 1613, with the date carved on a stone of its front. All around was the marsh: in the Middle Ages the area was called Debbia, on the edge of the lake of Valdinievole which today is the Padule di Fucecchio, and people lived by fishing. From 1780 Peter Leopold of Lorraine had the land drained, and the settlement moved to a more inland spot.

To become a comune, though, it took four centuries. The new village was split in two: the western part belonged to Pescia, the eastern to Uzzano. In 1893 the Pescia part asked and obtained to pass to Uzzano, becoming its largest and most populous hamlet; from then on came the attempts to have Uzzano's town hall moved to Chiesina. Failing that, the village began to ask for autonomy, and obtained it on the twenty-third of January 1963. In the twentieth century flowers took the place of fish: nurseries and the flower trade with the nearby flower market of Pescia, until the crisis of the nineties closed many firms. In the main square, beside the church — rebuilt in 1848, and of the old building only the seventeenth-century altar front remains, which today serves as the doorway — stands the xenodochium, the hospice for travellers of about 1300, turned into an oratory in the seventeenth century. And since 1979 the village has run Il Fiore, a national competition of poetry, drawing and photography.